Monthly archives for November, 2015

The Van Stadens Forum meeting took place on 4.10.15 with a visit to the Lottering Forest to look at the indigenous trees planted and to point out the bottlebrush infestations on the way to the Upper Dam. The river was flowing strongly which made for a spectacular waterfall:

Then on the 8th the monthly meeting was a walk to the Lower Van Stadens Dam and beyond. We had an excellent turnout and the weather was perfect. Good to see the positive effect the Working for Water teams are having on the indigenous vegetation.

We have kept an eye on the Brabejum tree by the Xhosa hut waiting for it to flower and finally it produced masses of beautiful flowers though advisable not too smell them.

It has been planting and rooting season for some time now and we found that rooting in pine sawdust gives us good results. Plenty of that at the Otterford saw mill so we went to collect a trailer full. With a scoop like this it didn’t take much time at all to load!

We have also made slow but steady progress revamping the shade house, the latest being the lowering of the irrigation pipes to take the load of the shade cloth. Working in it is a pain because there are plants everywhere.

We collected a large number of Yellow Woods on the farm Belmoral, bagged them, put them in the greenhouse and promptly the irrigation timer packed up. Fortunately we had a spare and it was a good opportunity to add a filter to stop the sprays being clogged.